About
When Jim Hill and Meesh Rheault Miller came together in 1996, a creative force was unleashed, a vortex of maximum energy. In no time their studio, the Apocalypse Center, evolved as combination workshop, gallery, salon, and production space, an inspired haven where they could work on and realize their respective and shared creations. With their inventions, assemblages, installations, photographs, films, collaborative projects, and ever-present mischief making, they tell unflinching stories, generate beauty, explore the dark side, and invoke viewers to contemplate, question, and participate in their process. Their shared passion for visual exploration, wordplay, and creative reconnaissance has led them on far-ranging collaborative odysseys. To engage with them is to give it your best shot, knuckle down, pour it on, pull out the stops, and participate in a search for life's unanswered questions through art and language. Together they are the Glowing Heads.
Jim Hill
Jim Hill has an exceptional ability to focus on the present moment. Whether storytelling, photographing or filming fellow artists at work, constructing an anatomical heart from planks of pine, or assembling a layered composite of experimental film and sound, his moments cover a lot of territory and have evolved into a body of work. Jim comes by his talents unequivocally. Having worked in theater and film for the better part of his life, his talents afforded him a place on feature films such as Dances with Wolves, Bull Durham, Angel Heart, Manhunter, City Slickers, and Silverado, as well as the independent classics Lust in the Dust and Tough Guys Don't Dance. He even focused, briefly, on commercial advertising aiming to please clients such as AT&T, Anheuser-Busch, FedEx, and HBO, culminating in the dubious honor of a Pepsi ad debut during a Super Bowl halftime break. Jim directs, produces, and edits films; photographs people, structures, art, nature, and the randomly interesting. He custom crafts beds, cabinets, tables, and other singular objects. One might see his skill sets collectively in Glowing Head's documentaries, featuring the Día de los Muertos observance in Michoacán or insights about life after sixty; or in videos highlighting installation art, paper arts sculpture, a mural project, or performance poetry— artists illustrating their process. Jim values spontaneity and a sense of play. He experiments, explores the margins, and cuts to the essential in his commitment to creative work and community.
Meesh Rheault Miller
Meesh Rheault Miller is a dynamo, something to behold if one can keep up with her. Meesh incites, speaks in compound, layered sentences, and surveys anything of interest or curiosity to note, photograph, or sketch for a future project. Throwing herself into her work, to say the least, she inks her body and presses herself onto paper to confront and cast out demons. Her hands twist wire into anatomically correct figures; paint, collage, and embellish chairs to transmute their meaning; assemble and juxtapose found objects and kinetic elements to unsettle the viewer; and design art stamps, cards, bookmarks, and photo montages. Her hands interweave sticks to create a colossal urban wicker man; maneuver objects to generate stop-motion films; photograph for aesthetic, experimental, and virtual assemblages; and construct a box with faux graphic label for frozen prairie dogs on a stick. Guided by her intellect, her hands sculpt, shape, draw, glue, stitch, hammer, carve, fold, construct, embellish, stipple, and transform—and that's the short list. Meesh leaves in her wake sparkler-brained creations. Remarkably, one hemisphere of her brain is in sync with the other. Aside from artist, instigator, provocateur, and irrepressible prankster, Meesh is a veteran researcher, film and video producer, art director, interviewer, and camerawoman.
